All About Jewelry Wire: What is Work Hardening?

What is Work Hardening?

Work hardening is a term that refers to certain metals’ tendency to stiffen up as they are manipulated. Very often, we use work hardening intentionally to give strength to soft metal to help it hold its shape. We can also use it to add springiness, as is helpful in a latched hoop earring or clasp.

Work hardening techniques allow us to deliberately change the temper of the wire that we want to work with and force it into a stronger state. But keep in mind that work hardening will also occur simply through the process of working with your metal, whether it is your intention or not.

Wire Temper

Basically, jewelry wire can be purchased in three different levels of hardness, or ‘temper’: dead soft, half hard, and hard. Dead soft wire is very easy to manipulate, but it is too soft to hold its shape after you form it, which would be a problem in some cases. For example, if you want to make a pair of ear wires with dead soft wire, you will need to harden up the wire either before or after you make the ear wires so they don’t stretch or bend out of shape.

Sometimes half hard wire might need a bit of work hardening as well, depending on the gauge (thickness) of the wire. Hard wire would usually not need to be work hardened at all, as it is already in the strongest form of the metal and holds its shape very well once formed.

How Does Work Hardening Work?

Non-scientific explanation:

Without getting overly scientific, just consider that any time we are working with wire and moving it – whether through bending, twisting, pulling, coiling, hammering, etc. – we are moving the metal’s molecules and squishing them closer and closer together. The closer the molecules are, the harder the wire is to bend.

Soft metal basically has a very loose molecular structure. I like to think of it as nice and relaxed. It is very pliable and forgiving in this state. If you bend it in the wrong place, it’s very easy to just bend it back and start again. But remember – the act of bending the metal and bending it back again is compressing those molecules and hardening up the metal at that point. If you continue to bend and unbend the metal in the same spot over and over again, you will notice it getting stiffer and stiffer and it will eventually just break!

That’s because as metal gets harder, it becomes more brittle – the more you push it, the closer it gets to a breaking point and will just snap when it’s had enough! (Like me, when I’m tense and uptight :)

With that in mind, it’s important to work harden the wire just enough for the design’s requirements. If you go overboard, you risk weakening the design by making it too brittle, which completely defeats the purpose of work hardening!

Work Hardening Different Wire Materials

The metal properties described above apply to non-ferrous metals like silver, gold, brass, and copper. And although they are similar, they still each have their own characteristics that are worth becoming familiar with.

Of course there is also a variety of other jewelry metals out there that may behave entirely differently, so you will want to do research on the properties of your particular material before working with it. My experience with aluminum wire, for example, is that it becomes brittle and will break more quickly instead of hardening up and becoming stronger like the other metals I just mentioned. Instead of trying to work harden aluminum wire, it is probably better to just start with a thicker gauge for the strength you need.

My suggestion is to practice with a few scraps of the materials you want to work with – and be sure to do this for each new metal you try – so that you can see and feel how easily the metal responds to the work hardening method you plan to use, or even just how it responds to being worked with your hands and your tools. The best way to familiarize yourself with a new material is to get it in your hands and work with it!

Can You Undo Work Hardening?

While you can harden soft metal, you can also reverse the process by heating the metal to a specific temperature (usually with a flame torch) to rearrange the molecules back to their relaxed softened state. This process is called ‘annealing’ and is generally not needed in basic wire working, so we will save annealing for another lesson!

After all this talk about when and why to work harden your metal, you are probably wondering how exactly to go about doing it.

There are several methods for work hardening metal, including pulling, hammering, twisting, and tumbling. I have detailed all these methods in a separate article in the interest of not having the longest blog post in the history of the internet ;)

Thanks so much for your question! I always use half-hard wire. It is just easy enough to work with but still hard enough to hold its shape nicely, depending on the gauge. I like to use both 22 gauge (.64mm) and 20 gauge (.81mm) for ear wires. I have a couple of ear wire video tutorials here that you might like to check out for ideas:

Just would like to thank you for your work making this sight, I found a passion on working with wire, and other crafts like leathers, painting, ect,ect,. I found lots of information, maybe to much, I get bogged down in, info overload. Your page is broken up nice with quick to the point things to know. It is very nice to be working with my hands again, I was a mechanic/ electrical worker on large engines. I must say that back in those days my hands was not and couldn’t do the things I do today, most of my work was with large, heavy parts that beat my hands up all my life. Very happy to able to work with jewelry making, My granddaughter is loving it too. Thank you, Paul H.

Thank you so much for your kind words! I’m so happy you found some useful information here – I do try to break it down into bits of info that aren’t too overwhelming. It’s great to hear that you are enjoying working with your hands again and that with jewelry making, you have something you can do with your granddaughter that you both enjoy. What a wonderful thing :)

I’ve just started a woodworking business and I like to incorporate alot of metals into it. I’ve never worked with copper before and when I went to Amazon to check out the options available, it was so exhausting trying to keep the gauges, hardness, shapes and everything else in mind and to understand what it all meant. I Googled and I came here. This has literally become my go to page for understanding wire related work- and I’m not even doing jewelry. Thanks so much for all the great info here.

Hi Tsedaniya! Thanks for stopping by to let me know! Wire is such a fun thing to work with for all kinds of projects, so I’m really glad these articles were able to help you out :) I hope you’ll get in touch if you have questions about anything as you go!

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